Need, Like A Drug
by Missmishka
Summary: "I saw these and I thought…maybe just one.  Something to help forget.  To numb it.  Stop it."  Post PMDA. Carol, Daryl and the lure of addiction.  Far darker than my other Caryl fics and without any warm fuzzies.  COMPLETE


Much love and thanks to Alamo Girl for the beta, I don't think I would have posted this one without your support.

_**Need, Like A Drug by MissMishka**_

DISCLAIMER: The usual warnings, I claim no ownership of these characters, they are simply borrowed with love and adoration from the original creators to have their stories embellished on a little more than the show may do. Not for any profit.

Warning: This piece contains references to drug use and a scene of questionable consent. There are no warm fuzzies here, please be aware of that before reading on. It is stark and deliberately so. It is a definite departure from my other Caryl fics.

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><p>Daryl was so tired from the hunt when he ducked into his tent that it didn't even occur to him that he hadn't had to unzip the door first. The flap had already been lowered by the woman kneeling inside.<p>

He froze, hunched over at the threshold of his shelter and stared at the bag she held in her hands.

He wanted to snatch it away, demand to know what she'd taken, how much and how long before he'd gotten there, but words were locked in his throat.

It came to him slowly, that she was just studying the contents of the Ziploc bag and hadn't taken any of Merle's drugs. A breath eased out of his chest at that realization and he cautiously eased further into the structure with her.

He knew that she knew that he was there before he made his presence unavoidable by kneeling beside her and reaching slowly for the bag of white tablets and crystallized chunks of Meth, but she didn't let him pull them away.

"Do they work?" she asked, keeping her eyes on the drugs shifting in her hands.

"Depends on what you use 'em for," he ventured carefully, afraid he knew just what use she had in mind.

"I've never experimented," her eyes stayed on the pills, but her focus was clearly elsewhere. "No drugs, no drinking, no smoking, no sex outside of marriage. Everything was always a no. But only when it came to me. Anyone else could do it, but no for Carol."

He started to argue the alcohol, given their dinner at the CDC, but in hindsight he couldn't recall a wineglass in front of her and there had been no chiding to let Sophia have a drink of the stuff like the others had done with Carl.

"People go nuts for this stuff. Kill for it," she kept rustling the bag and shifting the contents as if hypnotized by the movement. "Is it worth it? Getting high?"

He froze like a deer caught in the sudden pierce of her gaze and years of memories rushed through his mind like the feel of heroin streaking through his veins. There wasn't a weed he hadn't smoked, 'shroom he hadn't eaten, pill he hadn't swallowed, alcohol he hadn't drunk, fume he hadn't huffed or liquid he hadn't pushed into his body at some point in his long, miserable life. The stuff had always been there from simple cigarettes and Budweiser to coke and E and there had always been something that he tried to escape in the experimenting. When Merle had gone into Meth production a few years back, the smorgasbord had been complete.

Daryl knew the ecstasy and agony of getting high.

He'd hallucinated, given impromptu stand-up on sidewalks, felt the bliss of sheer nothingness and the crushing weight of all the hopelessness of life falling in on him.

He'd felt like he could fly and like he was suffocating.

Been anywhere from ten feet tall and bulletproof to about as big and brave as an abandoned toddler knowing no one was coming to care for it again.

He'd had trips where he'd laughed or cried or screamed for hours, sometimes doing all three until his vocal chords were nearly shredded.

Bouts where he'd felt his skin was coming off or had something crawling beneath it and torn at his flesh to try and get it off or out.

Been cold as ice clean through, complete with teeth that damned near broke from chattering on some of the hottest days on record and raced out butt naked, feeling like his insides where boiling within him despite it being one of the coldest days and deepest snowfalls of winter.

And he always crashed. Whether he achieved a high or hit a new low with the narcotic, there was always some bit further he'd found to fall.

He'd come-to in gutters, dumpsters. In his own filth and body fluids. In beds with strange women, a man once, and on jail cell cots or hospital gurneys. Only on occasion had he woken in his own bed.

"No," he finally answered her question without expanding upon it.

"I just need…" she bit the words off and hugged the bag to her chest.

"You opting out now?" he asked coldly, having needed the question asked for days. "That was this is?"

She threw her head back with a tearful, choked and bitter sound that only a real twisted fuck would call a laugh.

"I don't know. I don't think I can," she started rocking back and forth on her heels. "I saw these and I thought…maybe just one. Something to help forget. To numb it. Stop it," she looked again at the drugs as if they were a Holy Grail. "They make you feel … different, don't they?"

Her eyes turned to his, pleading and suffering in such a way that he was tempted to swallow the whole lot himself.

"I can't do this without something. I can't…_feel_ like this anymore…it hurts. Dear God, I hurt!"

Daryl couldn't say a thing in the face of that, so he just reached out to grab her. She fell against his chest, sobbing, finally dropping the drugs to cling to his shirt with her hands.

"She's everywhere. Everything I see, hear, taste, touch, smell, think…it's her and she dead and died one of those …things! I pulled her out of that building, made that choice for her so she wouldn't die in that explosion …only to watch her put down like a dog."

The shudders that raced through her frame at the horror and anguish made it hard to hold her, but he kept twisting and pulling to keep her pressed against him, wishing with everything inside himself that he didn't have to hear and know these things.

She was on a roll now, though, unleashing all she'd been holding in for the three days since they'd buried Sophia.

They'd all known it would be ugly.

"She was the only light that ever shined on my life and it's gone. I can't…stand this _cold_ anymore."

It was the last straw his back could take and he had to shut her up.

She was cold, he'd get her warm.

She wanted to feel something, then he'd make her feel it.

He put his hand around her neck, gripping tighter than he meant to as he shoved her head back to silence her mouth with his own.

Her throat convulsed under his fingers, but he didn't stop to think about what it meant.

He pushed her back on his bedding and followed after her, putting all his weight against her when she seemed inclined to struggle. His hands let her go to yank at her clothes, not feeling it when hers rose to claw and push at his shoulders.

He couldn't get her pants off completely, so he settled for shoving them to her knees before tearing his own open.

Where the damned erection came from, he neither knew nor cared as it sprang through his lowered zipper. Seeing no way to get between her knees with the material bunched there, he flipped her onto her stomach and angled her up with a rough hand on her abdomen.

At some point, her sobs had turned to gasps and pants for breath. Her clawing hands turned their energy on his sleeping bag, knotting and tearing into the bedding. A wounded sound escaped her when he shoved it in with no moisture to ease the way.

"You feel that?" he snarled, pressing his head against her back with a grunt.

Her scream tore through the shelter and beyond to the camp, as he pulled back to push back in, but he didn't care or stop, even knowing the tent still gaped open for anyone to see.

They'd think he was raping her and he was, just as she raped his emotions. Maybe Rick or Shane would put a bullet in him for this and then she could swallow all the little pills she wanted and they'd all be buried here on the farm with Sophia.

Modern fucking family.

Lost in the dark, sucking void of his head, it took him a while to realize that despite the merciless thrust and recoil of his hips against her ass, it was lifting without any urging from his hands.

Disbelieving that she could be moving _with_ him, he froze for a moment, feeling genuine horror as he watched her brace her hands on the ground for the leverage to push up into him and demand that his thrusts continue. His dick was driving in and out easier, her hole having grown moist at some point, allowing him to slide more than tear into her. A litany of a single word was running quietly from her lips as she pounded her head against the floor.

"_Yes."_

Whether she was consenting to the violation or answering him as to whether she felt it, he didn't know and would think about later.

For now he kept focused on the physical, grabbed her shoulder and locked her in place while he shifted around on his knees until he straddled her bound legs.

He drove in harder and faster from there, listening to the pace of her mantra changing to keep time with his thrusts.

How long it lasted, he didn't want to know, just as he had no desire to ever know if she got off on it.

It churned his gut enough to know that he had relished, for even a second, the hot, tight clasp of her cunt and spilled a load in it.

He fell off her on to his back and lay there wondering what and how and why and getting no great insight to any of it.

After a while, all sounds stopped from her. No crying or panting.

He wanted to say something to take them back to some place before just then, but he suddenly realized that he'd never even said her name. In the time they had been together, the words he had chosen to speak with her, he'd never let her name slip past his lips.

Just when he thought there could be no more _wrong_ to be uncovered in this world.

She finally scrambled to pull her pants back up and shuffled out of the tent before bolting from sight. He didn't blame her. He was glad to have her gone so that the do-gooders could come in and kick his ass.

No one came charging in to demand explanations or justice for what he'd just done to the grieving woman, though. He eventually stirred to wonder if they were all dead or something, tucked himself back in his pants and moved from the tent to check.

He was still buttoning up when he got to where he could see the others preparing the evening meal.

Carol wasn't among them, but everyone else was accounted for. Their gazes shifted from him, awkward and embarrassed like they'd overheard something intimate from his tent and didn't want it publicized that they knew about it.

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyeballs and wondered if maybe _he_ had gotten into Merle's stash.

Thinking of that damned bag, Daryl turned back to his tent, closed the flap and reached for the Ziploc.

All the prescription drugs had been scavenged and used for their various injuries. All that was left were some tablets of Ecstasy and Merle's precious Meth. Daryl hadn't done a drug since this whole thing had begun and wasn't tempted to have any now. He'd just been holding them. Knowing that his brother would expect them back first thing when he got back.

'Cept Merle wasn't coming back, at least not as anything that'd be interested in the narcotics, and it was well past time for Daryl to face that.

He took them out into the woods a ways then opened the bag to scatter the shit like confetti. The bits of blue and white littered the ground around him, in the circle he had flung them, and he found himself laughing at the fucked up thought of all that money wasted. Like money meant anything anymore.

Like anything meant _any_thing anymore.

He went straight back to his tent, foregoing the dinner they had made with the rabbits he'd snared. He festered in the solitary isolation and growing darkness in his shelter, trying not to smell the sex in the air.

It was hours later, near as his internal clock could gauge, when the unzipping of the flap jerked him from an unsettled doze.

She fell on him before he could get his bearings, fingers tearing open his pants and teeth crashing into the skin she ground her mouth against. He didn't know if she had stripped quickly or come to him naked, but she was climbing atop him in no time without a damned stitch on her body. She touched her hand to his dick long enough to guide it to her puss as she slammed herself down on him.

"_More."_

With that word, he knew that for all the things she had never done before her daughter's death, she was making up for lost time in some regard.

He wouldn't have pegged her for the addictive type.

Any more than he would have imagined himself a pusher of this particular drug, but that didn't stop his hands from grabbing at her hips as his body bowed up into hers.

She bent over him, hands finding his face in the dark to hold it still for her mouth to find.

He rose up to meet her lips, relishing the kiss that made this joining something more than the hard fuck that afternoon.

It had been her softness that drew him and he needed that now more than ever, just as she needed the hardness within him.

In the dark of the shelter and their souls, they clung together and fed the need.


End file.
